Alvvays - An obsession called C86

In the heart of the '80s, Britain's NME was among the leading voices of the global alternative music press, and it would often put out compilations featuring tracks by emerging bands signed to independent labels. One of these, C86, would soon become legend. Featuring tracks by artists such as Primal Scream, Bodines, Pastels, Wedding Present, Shop Assistants, Soup Dragons and many others, the compilation ended up codifying a genre built on jangling guitars, simple structures and a primitivist approach to writing pop songs. At first, as often happens in music criticism, the C86 label carried mostly negative connotations. Over time, though, it became a canon of purity and spontaneity that would go on to win converts.

About 25 years later, in 2011, a band from far-off Toronto would make its fortune precisely thanks to its obsession with that legendary cassette.

Alvvays were founded by the sweet, snow-skinned blonde Molly Rankin, daughter of John Morris Rankin, violinist in the celebrated family-run folk collective The Rankin Family. A guitarist and vocalist, Molly invited her neighbour and childhood friend, the lanky keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, to join her. Met at a gig, the next person to join the band - and also to win a place in Rankin's heart - was the talented guitarist Alec O'Hanley. About a year later, the trio would expand the lineup further with drummer Phil MacIsaac and bassist Brian Murphy.

The band's name was again chosen by Rankin, who loves the sense of nostalgia and melancholy the word conveys. The decision to spell the moniker with two V's instead of a W, meanwhile, was dictated by the existence of another band already signed to Sony under the same name.

Beyond the aforementioned influence of the C86 sound, Rankin and O'Hanley have often said they were heavily influenced both by the Smiths and by the Primitives, as well as, of course, by Belle And Sebastian. Molly believes that growing up in a family devoted to folk music, listening to the genre since childhood, shaped the way she blends sonic textures, even though that lineage isn't obvious on a first, distracted listen to Alvvays' music. Derivative is a word that often carries negative connotations in music criticism, but it's a necessary one to describe the band's delightfully backward-looking take on the sound - one in which the slightly noisy jangle of indie-poppers past gains new life and goes on to colour songs written with flair, lightness and pure pop genius. A subtle lo-fi touch gives the light indie-pop pastel shades of Alvvays a faint graininess, turning them as sweet as crêpes whose ingredients are perfectly balanced even though the flour was poured into the batter without being too meticulously sifted.

Once settled in Toronto, the band began recording singles - chief among them "Adult Diversion" - which soon became minor cult favourites, earning them support slots with Canadian acts of the calibre of Peter Bjorn And John and the Decemberists. Co-produced and released by Transgressive, Polyvinyl and Royal Mountain, the band's self-titled debut was recorded in 2013, overseen by Chad VanGaalen and mixed by John Agnello. Once finished, Alvvays was released in July 2014.

The album opens with "Adult Diversion" itself, which, with its scrappy rhythm and guitars faintly rippled with distortion, hits us with its bittersweet lightness and the melancholy so dear to Rankin. The melody is as simple as it is effective at capturing the feverish rush of an awkward courtship, with chases through subway underpasses and one drink too many just to find the nerve. Next comes what is probably the band's masterpiece, as well as its most famous song: "Archie, Marry Me". Here too the melody is absolutely perfect and the instrumental parts are delicate to a prodigious degree, while Molly begs her Archie to marry her, skipping the ceremony and the crazy expense and worrying only about signing the paperwork. Even though the song's lyrics are steeped in irony and the financial troubles typical of millennials, the sugary arrangements turn it into an almost poetic little vignette.

Postmodern romance also rules on the caressing "Ones Who Love You", where Molly's treacle-thick voice glides over the guitars and the slippery rhythm, stretching out until it brushes up against dream-pop. The album never lets up, pressing on to rack up one winning melody after another with "Next Of Kin", a jangle number prodigious enough to match the quality of its most illustrious models.

A lethal blend of twee guitar, bittersweet keyboards and tears brings melancholy back to the fore, more potent than ever, on the gem that splits the album in two, "Party Police" - so immediate and effective that, perhaps because we already carry its essence in our hearts, it feels familiar from the very first listen. Just as we carry clear in our minds the lies we tell ourselves, like "When you whisper you don't think of me that way/ When I mention you don't mean that much to me", and all the other romantic sighs that make "The Agency Group" another sweet pool of tears to wallow happily in.

It then glides toward the close, first with the delightful, lullaby-paced ballad "Dives", then with the sparkling "Atop A Cake", yet further proof of the melodic and compositional grace of a band that seems anything but inexperienced. Finally, it dissolves into a dreamy sea of reverb titled "Red Planet". It's the gentle close to 32 minutes of crystalline, feather-light melodies that feel lost in time - recorded in the new millennium, yet sounding as if they could date back some twenty years earlier.

Just three years later, still under the wing of Polyvinyl, Transgressive and PIAS, Alvvays deliver their second album, Antisocialites. The record doesn't update the formula of its illustrious predecessor in any way: Alvvays stay faithful to their winning canon, and all Molly and the others care about is stringing together another run of perfect, sticky, emotional indie-pop songs.

If anyone changes anything, it's perhaps only Kelly MacLellan, who carves out more space for her vintage keyboards, on a record that compared to the debut loses maybe just a bit of urgency and spontaneity. Or maybe it's simply the lack of the novelty effect, and if the two albums had come out in reverse order we wouldn't even be making this observation.

Once again it falls to the record's scrappiest track to kick things off, an "In Undertow" that lights up the guitars bit by bit until its reverbs burn like embers. The obsessive search for a face in the crowd, the burning desire to dream of her every night, are the ingredients of the instant classic that follows, "Dreams Tonite", a song second in fame only to "Archie, Marry Me".

After the languid small-town boredom staged by "Plimsoll Punks", it's the turn of "Your Type", a power-pop number that stretches out thanks to the keyboards between verses, while Rankin lets her sugary voice swirl through her most daring runs. Even a dead love, the one in "Not My Baby", becomes for Alvvays a place to bask in, with guitar and keyboard intertwining to sketch frozen lakes as the night dissolves.

We mentioned the greater space claimed by MacLellan, who dominates the scene in "Hey" with a whirl of multifaceted, swirling keyboards, while on the album's romantic closer, the wonderful "Forget About Life", she builds the hazy atmosphere in which Molly can let her half-naked voice dance.

Also notable are the two noise-pop numbers "Lollipop (Ode to Jim)" and "Saved by a Waif", both flavoured with hefty Britpop accents, as is the skeletal, ice-bound ballad "Already Gone", truly poignant when its closing dissonances hit.

Alvvays would never have wanted to wait 5 years to make and release a new record. But this is a band that never writes while on tour, and the success of Antisocialites ended up stretching that wait out far longer than planned. Then came the pandemic and the resulting closure of the border between Canada and the United States - which even led to the departure of the band's entire rhythm section. Once the long-awaited normality returned, the group's core - as ever Molly Rankin (vocals, guitar), Alec O'Hanley (guitar) and Kerri MacLellan (keyboards) - brought on board two excellent replacements in Abbey Blackwell (bass) and Sheridan Riley (drums).

Despite the long creative standstill, Alvvays' dreamy style has stayed exactly the same. The small novelties of Blue Rev, the band's third record, lie purely and simply in the nuances, in the folds of songs whose arrangements are simple only in appearance, while actually obsessively crafted down to the last detail.

We can say it loud and clear right away: this third collection of songs from the Canadian band, their longest yet (14 tracks for 38 minutes of music), shows no signs of flagging. It's no surprise, then, that many consider it their best release to date. The band's indie pop, as fizzy as it is melancholic, once again becomes a treasure chest of bittersweet stories, romantic disappointments and irony - plenty of irony. Had Alvvays not already spoiled us this way, it would be astonishing just how many great songs, with such a literally electrifying impact, a band could pull out of material as well-worn as C86-derived noise pop.

The opener "Pharmacist" and its sighing melody immediately pull us into a whirlwind of reverb and melancholic thoughts so universal they feel like our own; O'Hanley's fleeting, fluttering solo placed at the end leaves you dazed and craving more. The sweet background hum and the poetic, obsessive brooding carry on, taking shape in Molly's sugary trills on the following "Easy on Your Own", a song with a chorus that's if anything even more immediate than the last.

Things get clearer and more sparkling in the twee pop of "After the Heartquake", while as for "Tom Verlaine"... well, an Alvvays song dedicated to the Television guitarist is simply something you have to rush to hear.

In a few moments on Blue Rev it also seems Alvvays felt the need to turn up the volume. With its jangle of metallic guitars, "Pressed" already injects a good dose of adrenaline, but it's the outros of "Many Mirrors" and "Lottery Noises" that really surprise, as they flirt with shoegaze and let thunderous reverbs and flangers shine.

Great fun too is the track driven by MacLellan's toy-like keyboards, a "Very Online Guy" that gleefully chuckles at dating-app lions; while amid aching strings, drum pads and '80s keyboards, "Tile by Tile" shows Molly and her band tackling a slippery year-end dance-floor number.

Adding further variety to this fine batch are a sweet indie-pop ballad like "Velveteen" and its counterpart "Pomeranian Spinster", breakneck noise pop that brings yet another instantly gripping chorus to life.

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